A World Elsewhere is a play by Alan Franks, presented in Theatre 503 Battersea from the 22nd of January to the 15th of February at 7:45 Tuesday to Saturday and 5pm Sundays (Pay What You Can Sundays – for Sunday performances of A World Elsewhere you decide the ticket price!)

Tickets can be bought from the Theatre503 website www.theatre503.com or by phone at 020 7978 7040

In A World Elsewhere you are transported back to the collegiate surroundings of Oxford college in Autumn 1968. It is the days running up to the US presidential election with protests in full voice against the Vietnam War.

The play dwells not only on the conflict of the young Americans, facing the ever-rising draft back at home but also on the so-called special relationship between the New World and the moribund, if changing, old one. It focuses on questions of public demonstration and the role of student protest, drawing parallels to organised protest, their history and present manifestations. In today’s landscape, some of that same spirit and ideology of the 1960s is arguably captured in the the approach of the Occupy movement, making this piece ever more relevant.

You’re living in the most amazing old buildings and studying the literature of the greatest language there is. You don’t do a stroke of work and all your cooking and washing is done for you. It doesn’t cost you a penny because the tax-payer is footing the bill. It’s a scandal really.’

1968. The world is in uproar. Industrial chaos, Vietnam, Nixon on the threshold of The White House. Amidst the dreaming spires of Oxford University a girl is losing her heart to a brilliant young American with a dark secret. This is a scorching study of old politics and young love set during an unforgettable moment in modern history, as the old world tangles lethally with the new.

Alan Franks was a student at Oxford with Bill Clinton. His latest novel, The Notes of Dr. Newgate, was a Guardian Book of the Week in November.

Director Sally Knyvette’s latest production was Judgement at Nuremburg at The Tricycle Theatre. She was a star of Blake 7 and Emmerdale.